How many fried eggs do I have to eat to heal these broken bones?
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COMFORT FOODS // Sour moon – Ieva Grigelionyte
The first important thing in making fermented cabbage is to choose a good cabbage head.
Two Cultures, Again – Kate Venables
I am a student in a creative writing programme, a mature student, from a professional background as an epidemiologist. Amongst ourselves, we students don’t really talk about ‘creativity’. We talk a lot about craft and sometimes we talk about ourselves and the way in which how we feel affects our writing. But rarely about ‘creativity’…
Dances with Rabbits – Walker Thomas
I stood under the alligator juniper that shaded my tent in the oak woods. Effie squatted between my feet. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade called his receptionist Effie. But the Effie at my feet was no lady. I called her F. E. Cottontail in my journals. Cottontails are coprophagous – literally, Fecal Eating. That…
ONE POEM – Miriam Gauntlett
last night i carved open
a tree in the yard and
at the centre of the
trunk was a small
knife
ONE POEM — Danae Younge
The trees are prettier this time of year, limp—
gowned in sweet milk stuck to our tongues.
Missing Woman – Katie Hunter
In early October 2020, my partner Greg and I drove at sunrise to Zion National Park in southern Utah. On the way I swigged coffee and snapped photos of sandstone cliffs dip-dyed red by the sun. They dwarfed what I’d imagined while planning our pandemic-adapted vacation – a national park tour via road trip, starting…
ONE POEM — Anisha Jackson
It was the temperamental radio,
the cats with full bellies,
the hilarious stench of fuel
Lemons – Victory Witherkeigh
“You made it, Grandma!” I said as I gave her a hug. The gold tassel swished in my face from the graduation cap I hadn’t removed yet. “I’ve been to all your graduations, Iha,” she replied in a huff, “And, I’ll be at the next one.” I gripped her hand as she steadied herself with…
POETRY & ART – Amber Rollinson
I try bleaching the sun
using liquid soda crystals
but the sky turns yellow too
ONE POEM — Finola Scott
breathe and /hold
lungs and belly
moon balloon full
I Can’t Recall a Time Without War – Casey Canright
The weeks that followed exploded into a patriotic frenzy. Red, white, and blue dotted every neighborhood – even our own. Old Navy’s Fourth of July T-shirts reemerged for the last few weeks of September. Dad brought home a flag – taller than me – which I demanded be hung by the front door, just like…
TWO POEMS – Patrick Landy
the slow inflections of the wind
where rivers run like scars.
The moon hangs quietly
in the blackened air, halved and emptied, decaying since dusk
ONE POEM – Ava Patel
Here lie abandoned gyro crusts and Bundt cake crumbs.
Your fingers shine with olive oil grease
It’s Always Going Away: Losing the Places We Love – Nina Smilow
New York is often unfairly maligned for being unfeeling, but that’s just what we call uncontrollable things, which the city is. It tumbles on, transforming a million times over the course of a decade before remaining stagnant for far too long. Occasionally, shifts rise rapidly from seismic events. I’ve seen sudden pivots in the wake…
ONE POEM – J. Freeborn
I dreamed of teeth
cracking teeth walnut
shells my cheek
hot on your back
TWO POEMS – DS Maolalai
waking
at midnight
to piss
on the sand dunes
and the sky overhead
like a badly
scratched frying pan.
ONE POEM – Nóra Blascsók
In an ideal world
the washing machine
is a portal to clean linen
dishes lean back like sun
loungers by the sink
Heaven-Born Things – Sally Gander
What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.Marcus Aurelius ‘It’s about a third full,’ I say, clutching the mobile phone to my ear as I hang my head into the water tank, my voice bouncing off the metal sides and echoing back at me. ‘Does the pipe…
ONE POEM – Mary Chydiriotis
a chant begins
a loud doleful wail
smear my body in holy oil
adorn my head with your crown of thorns
Midnight Games – Madeehah Reza
It’s not that she wasn’t happy for her sister, far from it. Nadia only wished she could hold on to her for a little longer.
ONE POEM — Alanna Offield
My soles are gelatinous, a mixture of blood, and yoke.
COMFORT FOODS // ONE POEM – Dea Guri
my father wanted to recreate the grapes
grow his own over our tiny backyard in the suburbs just outside the city
his vision was three separate plants,
arching and twisting their vines from our neighbor’s garage to ours
ONE POEM – Kate LaDew
I swirl my eyes inside the paint
tears forming at the edges of me
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them: Managing Isolation and Becoming the Fabric of a Place – Joanna Mason
January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…
ONE POEM – Nicola Maclean
Zones one to three have become a long-distance relationship.
Underground, Hades and his sardine dead
reach their eleventh hour
FLASH FICTION – Kirsty Crawford
I sway and I spin, I smile. Sometimes even in perfect moments, you begin to feel the cold creep in.
THREE POEMS – Susan Moon
My mother packed eggs sunny side up,
Spam slices golden-browned to perfection
tucked into my lunchbox.
COMFORT FOODS // ONE POEM – Lindy Biller
and what does it mean
that her blood still sings
through the Old Quarter
of my veins?
ONE POEM – Alice Foo
The angel comes unbidden
on a Thursday morning,
knocking briskly, handing me
a pineapple and thirteen coral-tinted roses.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Jessica Swank
Through photography and sculpture, I question how the manipulation of behaviour and patterns dehumanises society.
ART – Geneviève Dumas
Because of the pandemic, we didn’t have any Olympics this summer, so I decided to reproduce the Olympic coverage in July by printing (screen printing) over selected pictures from the Montreal Olympics of 1976
ART: Natalie Bradford
Through countless retrievals, our memories of precious moments lose their ‘truth.’
ART: MY BALCONY GARDEN – Labdhi Shah
‘As I listened to music and wrote poems, the space came alive, became my balcony garden, and gave new life to me.’
The View from Here – Lettie Mckie
A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…
My Unsung Sheroes – Susan Moon
Just a spoonful satisfyingly sears on the way down, tickling all the microvilli on its magic school bus trip through the body. A taste so tangy, a flavor so fearless. Anything but diluted, the way I’d always told myself to be.
VIDEO: 2020aliveness – Maggz
‘where reality and subconsciousness overlap and everything blends.’
ONE POEM – Imogen Osborne
We return to find
the magnolia still
bruising itself into blossom.
Some observations concerning the desirability of a new paradigm for medicine
We physicians have never had a clearly defined mission. That mattered less when expectations were lower and we could do less. Now though, the reigning paradigm is grounded in basic science, excessively confident, inpatient-centric, and broadly focused on treatment of symptoms and signs, on diagnosis and therapy. The development of a new medical paradigm seems…
ONE POEM – David Linklater
The train leans through
the Highland line, Inverness
to Fearn, wheat either side.
This carriage bows for you.
COMFORT FOODS // TWO POEMS – Daniele Nunziata
I’ve tried planting potatoes since you left,
but they never grow the way they did for you.
Failing to Eat a Local Delicacy – Michael O’Mahony
Lorighittas are a type of pasta made in one small village, Morgongiori, on a side of a mountain on the east of Sardinia. Only the women of this village, and only some of them, know how to make lorighittas. A lorighitta is effectively a woven pasta made from a dough of semolina and water. Each…
